Walt Whitman - The Complete Poems

WALT WHITMAN: THE COMPLETE POEMS

WALT WHITMAN, once referred to by D. H. Lawrence as the greatest modern poet, and the greatest of the Americans, was born on 31 May 1819 in West Hills, Long Island, New York, and was brought up in Brooklyn, the son of a farmer turned carpenter. At the age of fifteen he was independent of his family and working as a journalist and journey-man printer. He taught for a short time and in 1838 founded his own newspaper. He became editor of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle in 1846. Herman Melville once said that a whaling ship served as his Harvard College; Whitmans college was the city of Brooklyn and the island of Manhattan. He loved the opera, was a frequent visitor to galleries, and an avid reader. By the time he was thirty-five he thought of himself more and more as a poet and early in July 1855 he published Leaves of Grass, probably setting some of the type himself. It contained twelve un-titled poems, a preface and a now famous portrait of the unnamed author in a workmans shirt. Although some critics treated the volume as a joke and others were outraged by its bold language and themes, the book attracted the attention of some of the finest literary intelligences. Ralph Waldo Emerson greeted him at the beginning of a great career, and told him that he found incomparable things said incomparably well.

Whitman added to, reshuffled and dropped poems in Leaves of Grass all his life. The great odes Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking and As I Ebbd with the Ocean of Life appeared in 1860; the great poems of the Civil War the collection called Drum-Taps and When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloomd were published as annexes in 1867. The tenth edition, including posthumous poems, was published in Boston in 1897, five years after Whitmans death in Camden, New Jersey, on 26 March 1892. Whitman had purchased a house on Mickle Street eight years before, and it was here that he received the worlds visitors.

Francis Murphy is Professor of English Emeritus at Smith College, Northampton, Massachusetts, U.S.A.

WALT WHITMAN

Edited with an Introduction and Notes by

FRANCIS MURPHY

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First published in Penguin Education 1975
Reprinted in Penguin Books 1977
Reprinted in Penguin Classics 1986
Reprinted with revised Further Reading 1996
Reprinted with new Introduction and Appendix 6 2004
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Introduction copyright Francis Murphy, 2004

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